Why the Poor Vote for the Right (and Stop Demanding More Equality)
29th March 2026
This is such a pure example of proglodyte self-absorption that I couldn’t resist.
There is a paradox running through politics today. Inequality is growing, but the demand for redistribution is decreasing.
Note the assumption that ‘inequality’ necessarily leads to ‘demand for redistribution’, as if everyone were as consumed by envy as the typical Leftist.
The working classes, historically leaning to the left, are increasingly voting for the right.
Perhaps because they’ve woken up to the fact that the Left wants to make them slaves of the government (run by the Left).
And election campaigns are won with symbolic battles over religion, immigration and “traditional values” rather than wages and welfare.
One of the delusions Marx left his spiritual children is the mistaken notion that politics is downstream from economics, when actually it’s the other way around. If the culture gets religion, immigration, and traditional values right, wages will get right by themseles, and there won’t be any need for ‘welfare’.
A new study (“Presidential lecture: identity politics”) by Nicola Gennaioli and Guido Tabellini of Bocconi University, forthcoming in Econometrica, offers a powerful and disorienting explanation: we are no longer divided into classes, but into cultural identities. And it is on these that the game of democracy is played.
That’s because ‘classes’ imply stratification within a single culture (‘nation’), and the Left has been devoted over the last half century to decomposing existing cultures (such as the U.S.) into identitarian tribes that no longer share a culture and therefore don’t constitute a ‘nation’ in any significant sense.
The heart of the model is simple and radical: people choose the identity they feel is most relevant to the social conflicts of the moment. When economics dominates the agenda, people split by class. But when culture becomes more salient—for example, because of immigration or ethical issues—people position themselves into opposing cultural groups.
Again, this is what the Left has been trying (with a lot of success) to do since the 1960s. Economics only matters within a particular culture, as the Left found out during World War I—the working class of Germany, Russia, France, Italy, and Britain were perfectly happy to go to war against workers from another nation (culture), and the Left just refuses to believe it.
Read the whole thing, and marvel at such cluelessness.